Commemorating Visual AIDS' three-decades-strong initiative to mobilize art institutions toward political acts of resistance
Published with NAME] PUBLICATIONS.
This landmark volume resurfaces the history of Day Without Art, a day of action and mourning in response to the ongoing AIDS crisis, organized by Visual AIDS and observed by thousands of museums, universities and galleries since 1989. Conceived amid the culture wars of the late 1980s, Day Without Art marked a decisive shift in how art institutions understood their social and political responsibilities, calling on them to confront the AIDS crisis publicly. What began as a call for institutions to close or remove artworks--using absence to give presence to the losses of the AIDS crisis--quickly evolved into a networked platform for socially engaged art, ranging from posters and stickers to net art, public projections and national television broadcasts.